How to Understand Nanometers

By Marija Kero

A nanometer is a very small unit of measurement and one nanometer is one times 10 to the negative ninth meters, which is also the same thing as one billionth of a meter. Find out how to understand nanometers with help from an experienced mathematics professional in this free video clip.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Marija, and today I'm going to show you how to understand nanometers. A nanometer is a very small unit of measurement and one nanometer is one times 10 to the negative ninth meters which is also the same thing as one billionth of a meter so it's a very small measurement and where we see this used a lot is in science. So a nanometer can be used for example to measure the diameter of a helium atom, that's one place that you might see it. You also might use a nanometer to describe the diameter of a ribosome so all things that are very small atomic things that are found inside. So a nanometer is a very small unit of measurement. It is one billionth of a meter and it's mainly used to describe atomic measurements in science and that is how to understand nanometers.